"Giorgione is regarded as a unique figure in the history of art: almost no other Western painter has left so few secure works and enjoyed such fame..." Sylvia Ferino-Pagden.

My website, MyGiorgione, now includes my interpretations of Giorgione's "Tempest" as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt"; his "Three Ages of Man" as "The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man"; Titian's, "Sacred and Profane Love" as "The Conversion of Mary Magdalen"; and Titian's "Pastoral Concert" as his "Homage to Giorgione".

Thursday, October 27, 2016

In earlier posts I have agreed
with those who have claimed that the small painting by Giorgione called “Boy
with an Arrow” is an image of St. Sebastian, one of the most popular male
saints of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For almost 1000 years the third
century martyr had been recognized as a protector against the plague. During
the Renaissance his popularity was especially great in Venice and the Adriatic
coast because of the frequent occurrences of plague.

In one of my first posts at
Giorgione et al… I pointed to the great similarity between Giorgione’s “Boy
with an Arrow” and Raphael’s earlier depiction of the saint. Both showed a
soulful looking young man with head tilted to one side and holding one arrow in
his hand. Both artists departed from the traditional version of a partially
nude man tied to a tree or column riddled with arrows, symbols of the plague.

Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, a
follower of Leonardo da Vinci’s in Milan, also produced a number of half-length
versions of St. Sebastian that antedate the work of Giorgione and Raphael. He
also depicted a soulful fully clothed young man holding one arrow in his hand.
His saint has a halo.

There is no mistaking the subject
of Raphael’s or Beltraffio’s versions of St. Sebastian.

Characteristically, Giorgione departed from
using traditional iconographical symbols like the halo. He did keep the arrow
but in another post I argued that he used color to identify the young man. His
tunic is red, the color associated with martyrs in the liturgy of the Mass.

Anyone looking at Giorgione’s
painting side-by-side with Raphael’s and Beltraffio’s would be hard pressed not
to see the saint in the “Boy”. The small size of the three paintings would
indicate that they were all made for private devotion. There must have been a
real market in the days of recurring plague. Beltraffio made a number of
depictions and we know that one Venetian patrician had two copies of the
Giorgione in his possession.

Scholars do not like to recognize
Giorgione’s “Boy with an Arrow” as St. Sebastian. They have proposed divine
figures like Apollo and Eros. I have come to believe that, more than anything
else, the facial expressions in these three paintings indicate a martyr. In the
account of the persecution and death of St. Stephen, the first martyr, the face
of the young man about to be martyred appeared to his accusers like the face of
an angel. Here are the words of the
Latin Vulgate, 6:15.

Et intuentes eum omnes qui
sedebant in concilio viderunt faciem eius tamquam faciem angeli.And all that sat in the council,
looking on him, saw his face as if it had been the face of an angel.

###

Note: I wrote this post in part to
commemorate the third anniversary of the death of my blogging friend Hasan
Niyazi who passed away suddenly and tragically alone in his new apartment late
in October, 2013. Hasan was the son of a Moslem family that had migrated from Cyprus
to Australia when he was a child. Like the children of many traditional
immigrants he broke away from the traditional religion of his family and became
an avowed secularist. Somehow, he developed a passion for the art of the
Italian Renaissance, especially for Raphael.

He was obviously an outsider in
every respect and so turned to blogging. His blog, Three Pipe Problem, quickly became a web sensation. To his passion
for art, he added his scientific background, as well as technical proficiency
in mastering blogging technology. Through social media he developed so many
friends and contacts that he became a kind of sun around which they orbited.

I first met him on the web in 2010
when Three Pipe Problem was just beginning to make traction. In the next three
years he went from an obscure blogger to a presence in the art history world. Six
months before his death he wrote me about his plans.

I am increasingly
busy. I have a few interviews coming up, including one with a prominent
Florentine restorer, Dr Goldberg and some other scholars. Work on Raphael
continues and many other things in the offing. My blog received its millionth
viewing the other week, which was pleasant - and I hope to commemorate it with
a prize in the near future. I have started learning Italian, and am also still
working as a clinician. Blogging has become more than a curious pastime, yet
there is still no easy way to make it viable financially, so I must continue in
my dual mode! (4/18/2013)

Then, like his beloved
Raphael and my beloved Giorgione he was gone in his mid-thirties. He may not
have had the face of a Renaissance angel and I don’t know what arrow took his
life, but I will always think of him when looking at the above paintings.